


Voice of the Condor

by Machiner6



Category: Taiyou no Ko Esteban | Les Mystérieuses Cités d'or | The Mysterious Cities of Gold
Genre: Artificial Intelligence, Atlantis, Gen, Golden Condor, MU, Mysterious cities of gold - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-24
Updated: 2019-12-04
Packaged: 2019-12-07 02:02:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,136
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18228416
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Machiner6/pseuds/Machiner6
Summary: After the terrible events surrounding the Second City of Gold in China, Esteban and his friends are in hot pursuit of the evil villain Zares, who has Esteban's father captive as ransom for the 3rd City in Japan. But when the Golden Condor aircraft experiences an accident, something happens that will change the course of their adventure forever.





	1. Short Circuit

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After the terrible events surrounding the Second City of Gold in China, Esteban and his friends are in hot pursuit of the evil villain Zares, who has Esteban's father captive as ransom for the 3rd City in Japan. But when the Golden Condor aircraft experiences an accident, something happens that will change the course of their adventure forever.

It has been a period of weeks since Esteban and his globe-trotting crew of adventurers had discovered the second City of Gold in China. Both times, one moment they had seen their glorious splendor and incredible treasures within, and the next, one greedy villain or another had tripped their security systems, causing a chain reaction that outright destroyed them in the process, and leaving little behind.  
By this point, the three children – Esteban, Tao, and Zia, had begun to question the point behind their quest. Ever since the Mages of the people who built these Cities told them that the journey was not only of finding them, but also the trails leading to them, many more questions remained unanswered.  
Tao, while having shunted it away for a long time to stay content, could not stop thinking about the point when he found several documents in the Chinese 2nd City, along with a war factory that constructed their Golden Condor and others like it, from the wonder material, Orichalcum. In particular, Tao recalled finding schematics for his personal boat, the Solaris. And yet he did not think to take them with him. Why would they leave such valuable material behind, only to have Zares unwittingly destroy it?  
Esteban, similarly, remained concerned about the whereabouts of his mysterious father, still in the clutches of Zares. But what worried him now, however, was how long it would take to find wherever it was Zares was searching. They had heard that the next City would be somewhere in Japan, which at this speed would likely take hours just to fly to.

\-----

Soon enough, the golden bird zoomed across the ocean towards the island country, and Esteban saw its cobra-shaped joystick retract back into its compartment.  
“That’s it! We’re on the right track to the next city!” He remarked with joy.  
Zia observed all of this, and nodded, “Yes, it’s controlling itself like it did back in China!”  
“And that means we’re one step closer to finding your father again! Right, Esteban?” Tao added.  
The boy nodded, but said nothing, feeling a sting of anger over how Zares kept this man prisoner, demanding the next city as ransom.  
Speaking of the devil, out of nowhere, the repurposed Olmec war machine zoomed past, hovered directly in front of where the Condor was headed, and fired its devastating energy beam into the ocean just as the bird was mere inches from its center.  
Everyone on board was panicking from this sudden attack, and for a few moments, they thought they were doomed, considering what the beam could do to solid ground and villages.  
But because the Condor was only narrowly exposed to the blast like a finger to a knife blade, something different happened. When the beam grazed the Condor’s fuselage and left wing, arcs of high-voltage energy danced over its Orichalcum surface, seeping into the cockpit and electrifying anything that was not insulated.  
The Condor shook and rattled, and an odd buzzing sound emanated from its flight deck, cutting in and out while the two strips of lights flashed with it in a red tint.  
The crew braced for whatever impact this bird would make in the approaching land mass, and by a stroke of luck, it skidded onto a protruding precipice of rock, and slid like an out-of-control car into a nearby tropical forest before it finally settled down, its landing legs remaining undeployed.  
“Is...” Mendoza coughed, “Is everyone all right?”  
“I’m fine, Mendoza,” Esteban moaned from the force of the impact on his chest.  
Tao agreed, “Me too, but what happened to the Condor?”  
Esteban observed that everything in the flight console was offline and dark, the boarding ramp stuck shut. Overhead, several tall trees had been hacked apart from the forced landing, very similar to the time they crashed into the Amazon rainforest during a thunderstorm.  
Zia asked, “Never mind the Condor, did you see that thing that fired at us?”  
Esteban cleared his throat, then replied, “Yes, that was my father’s Olmec ship,” His brow furrowed in suspicion, “My guess is that Zares used it to try and kill us.”  
Tao speculated, “If he had aimed a bit closer, it probably would have worked.”  
Mendoza guessed, “I’m not sure, Zares would not have wanted to simply kill us off, not with the ransom he holds against us. Maybe that was only a warning shot?”  
Zia stated, “Well, either way, he probably knows we’re here now.”  
Esteban stood up from his seat and stated, taking the Condor’s activation disc from its slot in the console, “Let’s go, then. The sooner we find him, the sooner I can find my father.”  
But right as he walked around the console to the small tunnel leading to the boarding gantry, Esteban was taken aback to see that it was still closed.  
Experimenting, he crouched down and pushed at one of the rungs attached to the ramp, but he had no luck.  
“Um, Tao? Something’s wrong, the Condor’s beak won’t open.” He looked back and reported.  
“Let me try,” the Mu descendant offered while rolling up the sleeves of his poncho.  
He observed the sealed ramp, looking for some kind of switch or button to open it, but found nothing. Tao and Esteban pushed on it in unison, but the Orichalcum material was far too thick and heavy to budge.  
“It’s no use, the Condor won’t let us out,” Tao sighed.  
“What about the...window up there?” Zia pointed to the glass canopy over the whole cockpit.  
Tao looked up at it, but shook his head, “I’m afraid not, Zia. Whatever the Olmec ship’s beam did to the Condor, it stopped him from having enough power to open that or its beak, even with the sun still out.”  
“You mean we’re trapped inside?!” Pedro shrieked as he stood up from his cowering position in the rear of the cockpit.  
“No-no-no, we can’t be trapped!” Sancho agreed, on the verge of hyperventilating, “How will ever fa-fa-fa-find the next City of Gold now?”  
“Calm down, you two!” Mendoza ordered his helpers. “We can figure this out!” Then he turned to the kids and asked, “Tao, you know so much about these machines made by the people of Mu; Surely you would know how to fix this great bird, as well?”  
Tao looked over at his seat where he left his Mu encyclopedia, thought of it, then answered, “Well, it’s not the Solaris, but I can try.”

\-----

Tao began by going over what he knew in his Mu encyclopedia, taking note of charts, formulas, and diagrams concerning machines and how they worked, then Tao lowered the book to examine the Condor’s control panel.  
At first glance, aside from the sealed compartment hiding the joystick, medallion, strips of lights on both sides, and a strange viewer, there was barely anything else noteworthy about this panel, other than that everything was inactive.  
Then he circled around to the back of the console, facing the ramp, examining every inch of the orichalcum material.  
“Hmmm…” he muttered as he searched further around the device.  
After a few quick glances, Tao ran his hands over the featureless back side of the console, reminded somewhat of the strange golden cube in the middle of the Solaris ship. Then Tao noticed a strange square out of place from the rest of it, which he now could see was faintly pulsing with a strange light in one corner of the cylinder.  
Tao pushed the blinking square, and with a loud whirring noise of servos activating, a large portion of the console’s panel slid downwards to reveal a hidden set of controls inside.  
“Aha!” Tao shouted with glee.  
“What do you see?” Esteban inquired while standing up, turning away from the closed beak to see what he was doing.  
“It’s some sort of mechanism for this console,” He answered, crouching down, observing the components.  
Inside was a gleaming panel of Orichalcum, etched with strange, geometric patterns running from one side to the other, with several odd objects attached to it. In certain spots, Tao could see strings of Mu hieroglyphs, but they were too tiny to make out. Clamped to one side of the chamber was a thin black rectangle wired to the panel, but its purpose he could not tell.  
What Tao noticed almost immediately was a set of small, pill-shaped objects attached to the panel that appeared burned out from the power surge, along with several cables running from certain nodes on the panel to others. Some of them had been disconnected from their sockets in the overload.  
“Well now,” Tao remarked with his scientific pride, “I...don’t quite know what I’m looking at, but it looks like Zares’ attack shorted out some of the parts in this panel.” He compared this to a set of schematics in the encyclopedia regarding electric circuits, and though his example was simpler, they matched.  
He removed one of the broken parts, stood up, and requested, “Mendoza, can you, Pedro and Sancho search your side for something like this?”  
“Certainly, Tao,” the explorer nodded as he stood up and turned around, ordering his two lackeys to help.  
Pedro and Sancho checked beneath their benches, while Mendoza looked under the 3 pilot seats. As it happened, Pedro bumped his head under the right-side bench before he noticed a small rectangular case, wedged between the far back and right-side walls of the cockpit.  
“Hey! I think I found something!” He yelped while reaching for the box and grabbing it.  
“Give it to me, Pedro,” Mendoza ordered.  
The skinny man then stood up, turned around, and handed the case to Mendoza. In the sunlight, now he could see that it was also made of Orichalcum, with the familiar red Sun emblem on top. Smiling, Mendoza turned about and handed it to Tao in turn.  
“Thank you, Mendoza,” he remarked.  
Upon flipping a small latch and opening the box, Tao found an assortment of small tools and spare parts that indeed fit what he needed for the panel. When he tried to pull one of the burned parts out, however, the contacts holding it in place delivered a painful shock.  
“Ow!” Tao shrieked.  
“What happened?” Zia piped up.  
He replied, “I’m okay, just tried to remove something the wrong way.”  
Esteban giggled at seeing Tao twitch like that.  
He grumbled to himself, “What was I thinking, trying to play with electric parts with my bare hands?”  
Tao reached into the case for a set of insulated forceps, then he grabbed each burned piece one by one and removed them, then replaced them with fresh ones.  
Then he turned to the loose wires, which looked more difficult by their small size and number. Some were smaller than others, and he had to check the ends of each one to see what color they were. But after some trial and error, he successfully plugged each cable into its respective port.  
“There, good as new!” Tao chuckled as he prepared to seal the panel again.  
But just before he did, as a set of lights began blinking on the board, a small array of eight switches lit up on the bottom of the cavity. Some of them appeared to be engaged, judging by their respective LEDs being on, while the others remained turned off. The Mu hieroglyphic labeling on each one surprised him. Those that were on read things like, “Homing guidance” “Boarding Ramp” “Solar engines” and “Flight controls”. Those that were not engaged were marked in fanciful terms even he couldn’t understand.  
“Esteban, look at this!” Tao called the boy over.  
He crouched down alongside Tao, and asked with wonder, “Wow, is this what makes the Condor work, Tao?”  
“It appears so, but you see these toggles down here?” He pointed to the switches.  
“Yes, what about them? You know I can’t read your language, Tao.”  
“I know that, but some of these switches are engaged, the rest aren’t. I can’t fully tell what they’re for, but I feel those others might be useful. What do you think?”  
Esteban found himself curious, but asked, “Well, the Condor has got us this far, what more would we need?”  
“Why not? The Solaris had secrets like this, too. Aren’t you a bit curious?” Tao urged him.  
Esteban thought about Tao’s ship having an enormous solar sail with a cannon built in, while this plane had no such weapons thus far, then he settled, “Okay, turn them on. But if something goes wrong, switch them back.”  
“That was my plan,” Tao nodded.

\-----

One by one, Tao flipped the deactivated toggles, then closed the maintenance panel.  
“All right, try inserting the medallion into the console again,” Tao suggested as he took his seat next to Esteban’s.  
“Here goes,” the boy braced himself as he reached for the disc in his pocket, crossing his fingers with the other hand.  
The sun medallion clicked back into its slot in the deck, and this time the whole console lit up, the monitor and lights pulsing to life once again.  
Pedro and Sancho cheered when they saw this, but their celebration was short-lived when the plane vibrated again, and the two of them panicked as usual, the latter asking, “Wha-wha-wha-what’s happening?”  
Something appeared on the monitor, and Tao leaned over and saw lines of Mu text scrolling by.  
“Can you read that, Tao?” Esteban asked, pointing to it.  
“It’s moving too fast for me to translate it!”  
Then, from an unseen source, the group heard a male, faintly distorted voice, coupled with the strips of lights on the console blinking at random with the voice’s syllables. It spoke, “Hello, thank you for activating me.”  
Everyone froze when they heard this.  
“Did...did that thing just...speak?” Zia asked with surprise.  
Tao leaned closer to the monitor, seeing that the text had vanished, leaving the screen cyan again.  
Esteban summoned his courage, and asked to make sure, “Who...who are you?”  
The synthetic voice answered, “You can think of me as the voice of your Condor. I have been silent for so long, waiting for the day someone with the Medallions of the Sun and Moon would become my pilots. That is you two, Esteban and Zia.”  
“Well...” Zia scratched her head in embarrassment.  
“Please excuse me for a moment, I have much to recover,” The voice stopped, and the screen began flashing more lines of text and various graphics. Esteban swore a few of them were maps of certain locations by the outlines.  
As it scanned through its data, Pedro asked, “Are you telling me that this big bird can talk now?!”  
Esteban cleared his throat, then suggested, “I’m not sure. Maybe this machine has a spirit like we do?”  
“A living machine?” Zia giggled. “What if it’s the living embodiment of a real condor?”  
Tao boasted, “I would say it is another of the great engineering feats of Mu!”  
The voice seemed to have finished its diagnostics, and Esteban asked it, “So, if you’re the Golden Condor, how do you know our names? And why have you been...waiting for us?”  
It answered, “Though I have been silent until now, I could hear and sense how you have utilized me at basic functionality.”  
Some of the kids and adults had looks of concern on their faces, but the voice continued, “I have been waiting for you, Esteban, Tao, Zia, because I wanted to thank you for taking such good care of me.”  
The 3 kids were surprised to hear this, looking at each other before Esteban managed to reply, “Um, you’re welcome, Condor. We could not have gotten this far without your help.” Then he cleared his throat and pointed to the back, “But it was Mendoza, Pedro and Sancho here that helped us find you in the first place.”  
“Yes, I know who they are: Explorers from Spain, seeking the Cities of Gold,” the voice replied, in an almost annoyed tone of voice, giving disturbed looks to the three adults.  
“Hey!” Pedro yelped.  
“What’s so wrong with exploration?” Mendoza asked, though having a hunch what the comment really meant.  
But the voice continued unabated, “Since my creation, I have been programmed for the event that a worthy pilot would find me on a mission to locate the 7 Cities of Gold. Esteban, I can sense that you are that pilot because of the medallions you and Zia carry.  
“Wait a minute,” Zia asked, “All this was here all along and we didn’t even know?”  
Mendoza pondered, “Someone must have had those switches turned off for a reason.”  
Esteban thought this over, also, then he decided, “Look, Condor, this is all very impressive, but we need to get going. My father is in trouble and--”  
“Zares has him prisoner? I know, Esteban,” it paused while the joystick extended back into the boy’s hands. “Just get me clear of this wreckage and fly me to a safe spot, and then I can let you out.”  
The boy pulled back on the cobra stick and lifted the craft into the air.  
“What would count as a safe spot around here?” Pedro asked.  
“It-it-it looks all the same to me,” Sancho agreed.  
“Hope we don’t spook anyone in this thing,” Tao muttered.  
Sure enough, as they hovered over the empty field of flowers beyond the forest, the Condor’s legs deployed, its solar wings folded, and the boarding beak lowered to the ground.  
“There you are,” The voice stated, as the joystick retracted back into the flight deck once more.  
“Be safe out there, children. I have no knowledge of what the Japanese culture is like, but in any case, watch your backs. Zares could be anywhere.”  
“What about you?” Esteban asked. “Suppose someone robs me of your medallion and tries to run off with you?”  
“I have safeguards, trust me,” it assured him.  
“Well, we’d best be off, then,” Mendoza declared.  
Esteban reached for the medallion, and the voice concluded, “Good Luck, Child of the Sun.”  
“Thank you...Condor,” the boy stammered as he pulled the disc from its slot, shutting down the craft as he did so.

\-----

As the group filed out of the Orichalcum bird, many questions remained in their minds. Esteban was the last one off to see the beak shut again.  
Turning back around to face Mendoza, he noticed the wooden peaks of several village huts off in the distance. With the shrouds of trees blocking off most of the surrounding area, and the one path leading to the village looked to be about a mile long, so the group felt safe for the time being.  
Tao looked back at the bird and gloated, “What do you know? Now we have seen the prowess of my ancestors! Look at how they managed to create life and consciousness from nothing! Look at-”  
Esteban grunted, “Enough about Mu, Tao! Don’t you think something’s very odd about all this?”  
Zia sighed, “Looking at the two of you is already painful enough.”  
Mendoza tried to comfort the boy, “Everything’s all right, Esteban. We’ll figure all this out in due to time, but for now we should focus on figuring out where we are, and how to find your father.”  
“Yes, you’re right, Mendoza,” the child agreed. He looked at the large medallion he still clutched for a moment, then pocketed it while joining the beginning trek into Japan.  
“You-you-you still think that giant bird is still worth anything?” Sancho asked his partner.  
Pedro huffed, “I’m not sure I want it anymore if it talks like that.”


	2. Rite of Passage

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> With Mendoza and his 2 helpers keeping the military busy, the children find themselves lucky and stumble upon the first clue to the next City. But someone is hot on their trail.

“You idiots!” A familiar voice blared over a speaker. “I told you not to hit the Condor! That blast was to be only a warning shot!”  
Inside the Olmec craft, three Japanese warriors were manning a series of controls.  
“My lord, it was out of our control,” one of them explained. “The prisoner broke loose, and he struck me from behind before I could aim properly.”  
This was true. Esteban’s father, Athanaos, had secretly broken out of his prison capsule downstairs. In an attempt to thwart these peoples’ plans, the man tried to attack the bridge operator and take over the controls. Athanaos pushed the operator against the control board, causing him to yank a joystick the wrong way. The radiation-scarred man had not intended this either. In fact, his intention was to stop it from firing entirely, but to no avail.  
Just as Athanaos reached for the controls again, two guards grabbed him from behind, and all he could do was watch the Condor short-circuit and crash. He feared that he’d just made the situation worse than it already was, but tried everything to not think too hard about it.  
In its place was a sense of regret over another factor: Since this Olmec vehicle had previously belonged to him before being commandeered by Zares, the villain had wormed many secrets out of him on how it worked, including a ship-to-ship communicator which Zares had also learned to tap into; along with the fact that the energy beam could be set to lower than lethal levels.  
“Never mind,” Zares continued with a sigh. “Proceed to the prisoner transfer point as instructed. And secure him so he does not pull something like this again. Understood?”  
“Yes, my lord,” the warrior nodded, while ordering the guards to secure him in the capsule again. With the villain’s men now hauling Athanaos back downstairs, all the weakened man could hope for was that the energy blast did not harm his son or his friends on board.

\-----

Zares took his hand off of a small device connected to a wooden box with a dial and speakers, setting it aside on the edge of his flight console. Though he was happy to have a way to interface with the comms systems built into the Olmec machine, he wished he was able to simply control both at once, but that was not to be.  
He did find it undeniably amusing to watch the golden bird crash into the forest. Though he figured that with a crash that severe, sooner or later, Esteban and his friends would either be discovered by natives, or recover and keep flying.  
He smiled as the Olmec ship sped off towards a distant location, knowing that his asset would be secure for when the time came.  
Zares then changed the course of his ship to outrun the ensuing ash cloud he could just barely make out from a nearby volcano. If that got in the turbines of his ship, he’d be marooned here. The less involved he had to be in the locals here, the better. All that mattered was Esteban’s group, his bird, and the next City of Gold, wherever it was in this land.  
He configured his ship to land near a beach on the east side and proceeded towards a secret room to shed his disguise and blend in as the explorer Ambrosius. Within hours, everything would fall into place.

\-----

Mendoza observed the path leading to the village and affirmed, “Looks like the only way out is into that village.”  
“Do you think it’s anything like China?” Esteban asked out of curiosity.  
“Possibly, but we won’t know until we enter,” the explorer replied.  
Esteban shrugged, then led his companions along, Pedro and Sancho hesitant as always.  
Tao asked Esteban as honestly as he could, “Esteban, that voice we heard, do you think it was like those...lumino-projections you saw at the last city?”  
“Not really,” Esteban answered. “It felt...different, like it was all around us. Like it really was the Condor itself.”  
Zia commented, “I felt it, too.”  
“If the Condor can talk now, I wonder what else he has in store for us?” Tao asked in curiosity.  
“We’ll be back for it,” Esteban promised.  
Zia giggled, “We always will be.”  
The conversation stopped when they passed under a red Shinto gate into a cobblestone road leading through the village; The group’s hopes for sanctuary were shattered when they saw armored guards patrolling the streets. Just barely visible overhead, up in the mountains, Mendoza sighted an elaborate Japanese palace perched near the base.  
When the guards were out of sight, Mendoza motioned with his hand for the rest of his group to follow him into this village. The Spaniard kept his eyes peeled for anything dangerous as he led.  
“Where are we going, Mendoza?” Esteban whispered.  
“To that palace,” the Spaniard replied, “I have a feeling we will not get anywhere without an audience with the lord of this land.”  
He then ordered the group to hide in an alley between two houses, saying, “I have a plan: I’ll pretend to be a victim of a shipwreck, with Pedro and Sancho as political prisoners I’m escorting. You three head East and look for the artifact that brought us here; This way I can draw those soldiers’ attention away from you.”  
“But Mendoza, how will we even find it?” Esteban asked.  
Tao grimaced, “I bet the Condor would have just told us where it was if you asked him.”  
“Then we would have been here and out again with no trouble, wouldn’t we?” Pedro whined. “Why must everything be so difficult?!”  
“Shhh!” Mendoza hissed, seeing a group of guards approaching from the north. He turned to the kids, “Go! We’ll catch up with you later. If anything goes wrong, get back to the Condor and find us. Understand?”  
“Yes, Mendoza!” Esteban nodded.

\-----

Pedro, Sancho, and Mendoza snuck out of their hiding place while the kids sped off in the opposite direction. The guards stopped their patrol, and in front, the Captain of the Guard, Tancheyo shouted, “Halt! Who are you? Where have you come from?” He and three of his cohorts drew their swords and spears as he said this.  
“I am Juan Sanchez Mendoza, ambassador from Spain,” he bowed, “I was transporting these political prisoners home when we shipwrecked here. If you would grant us an audience with your master, I would be grateful.”  
“Lord Shimatsu decides who comes and goes, and you three people are nothing more than foreigners,” Captain Tancheyo snorted. He signaled to his colleagues to bind the Spaniards’ hands with rope. “It is he who will decide your fate.”  
Mendoza formally accepted this, bowed, and proceeded to follow the soldiers up the road, as ordered.  
Pedro and Sancho wanted to ask questions, but the threat of being beheaded or stabbed put this straight out of their minds.  
They looked around and saw more soldiers patrolling the streets, young men and woman in civilian clothing marching with them.  
“A safe haven, this is not.” Pedro thought.

\-----

Esteban, Tao and Zia sprinted down the narrow road into the forest again, finding a path running parallel to a river coming off the mountain.  
“You sure we can just find what we’re looking for out here?” Tao asked while trying to keep up the pace.  
Esteban reasoned, “If the Condor brought us here because of that artifact, it can’t be that far away!”  
When they saw they were out of sight of the soldiers, the kids slowed to a brisk walking pace.  
Esteban looked at the river and chuckled, “Good thing we don’t have to cross that, I’ve had my fill of being caught in rivers and creeks.”  
“Me, too!” Zia nodded.  
The path turned to a fork, one side bearing a bridge where the river turned northeast, and the dirt path continuing southeast while a small stream branched off into a rice paddy.  
Before either of them could ask where to go, they sighted another group of soldiers approaching the bridge.  
“Run!” Esteban shouted. “That way!”  
He pointed towards the bend in the path, and they raced onward towards the rice farm.  
The soldiers were about to charge down that path, but a female soldier cried, “Captain, no! That is a sacred shrine!”  
“Who gave you orders, Ashiko?” He snarled, “I act, you obey!”  
Another soldier protested, “Commander, you do not want to anger Amaterasu, do you? That is her shrine down there!”  
Commander Takahashi hesitated, then sighed, “Yes, Shinji. Our patrol is nearly over anyway, and we are needed at the palace. Carry on.”  
Then the squadron advanced up the path back to the palace. Ashiko took a brief glance down the path, but only for a moment before her eyes darted back to attention. Something told her that a person she knew was down there by the shrine, but she couldn’t remember what.

\-----

Mendoza, Pedro, and Sancho found themselves shoved into a dirty cell under the palace, the iron gate locked shut by their jailer.  
“And stay there!” He shouted. “Lord Shimatsu is very busy, so you’ll be in there for a while!”, laughing as he left.  
“Nice going, Mendoza!” Pedro groaned.  
“What-what-what were you thinking?” Sancho stammered “Now we’ll never get out!”  
“Quiet, you two! I have a plan, all we have to do is wait for our audience,” Mendoza assured them.  
“Wait?” one of their cellmates asked, raising his head. “You’ve come at a bad time, my friends. Lord Shimatsu will stop at nothing until he has conquered and enslaved every other clan in Japan. He would never have time to deal with petty foreigners like yourselves.”  
“We’ll see about that,” Mendoza boasted. “We have plenty of time.”

\-----

As the day grew to a slightly overcast afternoon, Ambrosius trekked through the forest in a Westward vector, tracing a signature of Orichalcum on his compass. He wasn’t yet sure if it was the Condor, or the thing that signaled it to come here, but whatever it was, he was certain he’d find it before those three meddling children did.  
Far ahead, he sighted a Shinto arch surrounding a strange statue that glinted in the sun, and with even greater luck, he sighted Esteban and his two friends racing toward it. But to his dismay, a fourth person was tending to a rice paddy in front of it. If he was to reach that artifact, that extra man would need to be out of the way first.  
Deciding the best solution was to wait and see what would happen, Ambrosius shuffled as close to the shrine as he could, and watched from behind a thick tree trunk.

\-----

Esteban, Tao and Zia came to a stop to observe the shrine.  
“Look! A statue made of orichalcum! This must be what we need!” Tao remarked.  
But the old man nearby noticed their presence, stood up, and stepped towards the kids, blocking their progress.  
“Why are you here?” He asked them in a gentle, yet wary voice, “Do you not know that this sacred site is for the sun goddess, Amaterasu? She is very tense, and would not want to be angered further after the tremors today.”  
“Tremors? What tremors?” Zia asked.  
“The volcano,” he pointed towards a gap in the trees where, just visible on the horizon, a cone of rock jutted from the ocean that spewed hot clouds of ash.  
“Oh...” Zia trailed off in surprise.  
Tao, curious as ever, asked, “Who are you, sir?”  
The old man smiled, bowed quickly, and answered, “I am Kenzu, a humble monk who tends to this shrine every day.”  
Esteban asked firmly, “Please sir, we were looking for the statue on that shrine, we think there’s something inside, something that’s connected to this,” he pulled out his medallion to show the old man.  
He crouched down to look at it more closely, and Zia’s as well, then his demeanor changed and he smiled, “Ah! I had wondered why the shrine had those shapes within it!”

He paused, then answered, “But before you approach the shrine, I must test you, so that I may be certain you are worthy of the goddess’ presence.”  
The 3 children were surprised to hear this, but Esteban cleared his throat and answered, “Well, test us, then!”  
“All right. Here is your first task: There are five stones in the water at the base of this shrine. Show me those that are the furthest away from the rest.”  
The three kids found themselves surprised as they turned to look where Kenzu pointed. Tao elected to take the task, then knelt down and looked at an array of smooth rocks, each jutting from the water in what looked like a pentagonal array. Tao stared at this, trying to figure out the catch to it.  
Unbeknownst to any of them, Ambrosius continued to observe, puzzled himself as to what the child was doing.  
Within a period of minutes, remembering some vague details about distance and angles, Tao realized that two of these stones formed a line through the pentagon that was longer than the others.  
Then he stood up, turned around, and pointed to the stones as he told the monk, “I found it, these two stones are the furthest apart.”  
Kenzu stared at this, smiled, and replied, “Good, now for your next task,” he paused while picking up two items from the ground and showing them to the kids, “Which of these is worth more than the other?”  
They looked at what he held: A gold coin, a pink flower, and a cup of rice. Each of them pondered the implications of these items, and what sort of worth Kenzu was implying, but Zia finally answered, “It’s the rice.”  
“And why do you believe that?” Kenzu asked with a furrow of his thick brow.  
“Because while gold may be valuable, and flowers are precious in nature, food is something no one can live without.”  
“Very good,” the monk warmly smiled as he set the items back down.

\-----

“Now, your last task is this: Capture the sun in this cup for me,” he requested as he picked up a small clay goblet from the ground, where his tools lay.  
Esteban took the cup and examined it, trying to think on what Kenzu meant by those words. Suddenly gaining a hunch, Esteban dipped the cup into the water, and considered a recurring, if embarrassing fact. Then he eyed the reflection in the cup, looked up, took a deep breath, and focused on his hunch, mentally praying it’d work.  
As it happened, within a matter of minutes, the clouds parted, and the sun shone through the trees to the point that the water in the cup glinted to a near-blinding level. Kenzu’s eyebrows shot up in astonishment, and he bowed, “Well, it seems the goddess favors you, indeed.” He cleared his throat as Esteban gave back the goblet, and gestured with his left hand, “If you truly believe that your medallions can satisfy her, then I will let you pass. Be wary as you go, however.”  
With that, the three kids approached the Orichalcum figure. At its base was a large lotus flower that the goddess knelt upon, whom appeared as a tall woman with long hair, in a flowing white cloak. Long thin beams radiated from a disc behind her head, and in both hands, she clutched a sword by the hilt, pointing it down into the earth like a knight.  
Tao noticed several markings along the petals of the lotus, and two of them, more prominent the rest, exactly matched the shape of the medallions.  
“Ready?” Esteban asked Zia as he removed his medallion.  
“Ready!” she smirked while disconnecting hers.  
With a satisfying click and a flash of golden light, the two orichalcum discs snapped into position, and the head of the statue began to move.  
It tilted forward, as if looking at the new visitors, then suddenly, the whole statue glowed with a radiant light. Seconds passed, and the light began to take shape around the statue, forming into a complete hologram of this goddess.  
She spoke in a calm, gentle voice, “Welcome, bearers of the medallions, and congratulations for making it this far! In this shrine, you will find my Flaming Sword. You may take it, as it is the key and the way to that which you seek. Good luck, travelers.”  
And with that, the glowing hologram faded, and the statue moved again, extending its arms, and offering the sword in both palms.  
“For us?” Esteban asked, looking back at the monk.  
“If Amaterasu has seen you as worthy to receive it, then yes,” he nodded.  
Esteban reached out and took the sword from its hands, then the statue changed its pose to a simple symbolic hand sign, and quickly fell silent as the medallions ejected themselves into the water, which Esteban and Zia were quick to retrieve.  
Just as they did, however, the children were startled to hear Kenzu shriek in terror, coupled with the sounds of a blade stabbing into flesh, and something heavy falling into the rice paddy.  
“Well now, seems you’ve done my work for me. Congratulations.” that disturbingly familiar voice spoke. “Now, give me that sword!”


End file.
